Józef Trzeciak

Memorial stone for Josef Trzeciak; the inscription reads: Executed as an innocent victim of tyranny and racism .

Józef Trzeciak (born December 19, 1910 in Węglówka ; † May 8, 1942 in Zachenberg , German: Josef Trzeciak ) was a Polish slave laborer who was executed in 1942 for having a love affair with a German . In 2012, a memorial was dedicated to him 70 years after his execution in Zachenberg.

Life

According to contemporary witnesses, Józef Trzeciak came to a farm in Leuthen , a district of the Lower Bavarian municipality of Zachenberg, in 1940 , where he met the then 16-year-old granddaughter of the farmer he worked for and began a love affair with her. On August 9, 1941, the couple were arrested and interrogated by the police. A medical examination revealed that his underage girlfriend was three months pregnant. The friend was first sent to the Deggendorf prison for three months and then released for delivery. Their child, a daughter, was born on January 9, 1942 and was baptized with the name Rosa. After the birth, the mother stayed at home in Leuthen. In July 1942 she was arrested again and sent to the Ravensbrück concentration camp . In July 1944 she was released from the concentration camp, where she had worked in the kitchen, and returned to Zachenberg.

On May 8, 1942, the child's father, Józef Trzeciak, was hanged on a mobile gallows at the edge of the forest about 300 meters west of Zachenberg . Three Gestapo officers involved were investigated in the 1950s for complicity in murder . The daughter Rosa lives today (2012) in North Rhine-Westphalia. She only found out about the events through research by the journalist Thomas Muggenthaler. Her mother died in 2002.

Uncovering the case

Research by the Regensburg BR journalist Thomas Muggenthaler into these and similar cases brought the crime to light. In the State Archives in Amberg , Muggenthaler came across files that prove 22 executions of Polish forced laborers because of forbidden relationships with German women in Lower Bavaria and the Upper Palatinate alone between April 1941 and April 1943 . Since 1940 the so-called Poland decrees threatened love relationships between slave laborers and German women with death . Muggenthaler first reported on these cases in 2003 in a radio broadcast entitled Verbrechen Liebe and published a book of the same name on the subject in 2010.

literature

• Thomas Muggenthaler: crime love: of Polish men and German women: executions and persecution in Lower Bavaria and the Upper Palatinate during the Nazi era , Edition Lichtung, Viechtach 2010, ISBN 978-3-929517-48-4 .

Web links

• Flora Jädicke: The End of Silence ( Memento from April 8, 2016 in the Internet Archive ). In: Bayerische Staatszeitung , May 18, 2012